Internet Protocol (IP) packets are aged in a network in order to cause the dropping of those packets that do not reach its destination within a specified duration. Time-to-live (TTL) is a value in a header of an Internet Protocol (IP) packet that tells a network device whether or not the packet has been in the network too long and should be discarded. Typically, the TTL reflects a number of hop counts that the packet is allowed to traverse in a network before being discarded. For each received IP packet, a networked node typically decrements the TTL field. When the count reaches zero, the networked device detecting it discards the packet and typically sends an Internet Control Message Protocol (ICMP) message back to the originating host notifying that the packet was dropped due to a TTL expiration.